


how to fill the space

by ymirjotunn



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Blood, Gore, Guro, Masturbation with Dubious Intent, Self-Harm, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, self-vivisection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:34:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22139383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ymirjotunn/pseuds/ymirjotunn
Summary: The Black Mask develops a method of self-soothing befitting someone of his station.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira
Comments: 7
Kudos: 67





	how to fill the space

**Author's Note:**

> please mind the archive warnings, rating, and tags <3

By the time it became a habit, he wasn’t quite sure when it had started. Just that, after hits, when he wasn’t ready to step back into the world he didn’t belong in, he’d stick around, inspect his injuries. They wouldn’t last, so he had to make the best of it. 

In the early days shadows hit harder, and marks actually had the chance to hit - that was when he hadn’t gotten the bright idea to off them without bothering to talk to them first. So back then he had injuries to inspect, just about every time. 

A year and a half, maybe two years in, nothing hit if he didn’t want it to. 

He-- usually did, though. Because. Well. At that point it had become a habit. Going over his body afterwards to check out the damage, and to do what he could with what he had before it was gone again. 

It was harder to feel pain in the real world. (Funny how it was supposed to be the real one, but everything felt so much less real than it did here.) And more dangerous. He didn’t, couldn’t die here, he didn’t think. He’d come close a few times, or at least he thought he had; memories of those times were somewhat hazy. 

But he learned quick. If he didn’t think it was his time to die, it wasn’t. Would never be. Not in the other world. 

For a while his inspections were relatively innocent. He wanted to assess the damage, was all. Learn from his mistakes and be better for next time. 

But to assess the damage he would touch the injury, and sometimes touching became pushing, and sometimes pushing became digging in fingers and sometimes digging in fingers became tearing at it with the claws of his gauntlets and somewhere along the line he sort of got impatient with their inefficiency, their relative bluntness, how much force was required to get the sensation he wanted, and he just-- used his blade instead. 

So the first time was _mostly_ an accident. He’d meant to cut himself open, but not. Maybe not as much as he actually had. And then he’d. Never seen that much blood before, because shadows didn’t bleed and cognitions only sometimes did, and he was curious so he’d pulled the skin further apart, pushed one claw inside just to see if he could feel anything and

(in the real world, he knew, it was impossible, because of the difference in nerve structures, but in Mementos he _wanted_ to feel it so he did)

and the times after that were definitely, definitely not accidents.

He was only really careful that first time. Not sure what his limits were in the other world. But then it turned out he didn’t _have_ any, did he, so the times after that he didn’t bother being careful. What point was there?

He’d take off his suit, piece by piece, because blood on metal was boring when he could have blood on skin (better to look at and easier to taste and more sensation), and because after the first time he touched his own heart and felt it convulse under his fingers, felt the way the inner workings of his body shifted with his gasp, he made a point to keep one hand free, to wrap blood-slicked around himself.

After a while it became a comfort. Knowing what every part was, and knowing their contours. Knowing how to push aside ribs and muscle and tendon to find tissue of a different texture, or to slide his fingertips along the unmarred sloping planes of bone, to hook a finger around a floating rib and yank gently gently until it followed the force of his hand, slipped sickly and obedient out of place.

Some days he’d guide it back. Relished the process of fucking himself up in a way that should have, _really_ should have been irreparable, and then putting himself back together, nudging everything back just so. He fantasized about walking into the real world like that, cut open but organized. The only thing holding him together his clothing. Walking into a studio and smiling so sweet and pulling off his layers and letting himself spill onto his lap, pool red on the suede chairs and pretty hardwood. Maybe throw the audience pieces of himself as souvenirs. They’d probably like that.

Other days he’d leave himself as fucked up as he could stand. Dip his fingers into the blood that pooled in his abdominal cavity and around him where he lay, paint the skin of his thighs a beautiful orangey scarlet. The feeling of blood against his skin was mesmerizing, unbelievably good, and it never took him long to get hard, and by then he had enough to distract himself to make it worse. Tearing whole chunks out of himself in reds and yellows and browns, holding them and memorizing their shapes and textures and tearing _them_ to pieces with his bare hands. Scattering those pieces on the floor around him and lying down on the ground and laughing, laughing, laughing, feeling the blood bubble in his abdomen with the motion of his diaphragm, spill over the sides of his incisions and along the border of his legs and hips, splash his dick with wet and warm.

Eventually he figured out how to stop screaming long enough to pull out the more painful things: first bones, because he wanted to see them properly, and then long strips of muscle, exploring their texture, testing how far they would stretch between his hands. He tested what parts of him were most interesting to wrap around himself and fuck. The texture of muscle tissue wasn’t always pleasant. He was somewhat put off by the nature of intestines, but there was something deliciously methodical about wrapping himself in them, pulling them tight, a slick hot pressure that was easy to come for, once he got past the initial disgust, and after long enough the disgust wasn’t really a problem anymore.

Why should it be? There was no one there to tell him how fucked up he was. When Loki hung around to watch he only offered praise, encouragement, approval.

And it was what he wanted. To be able to destroy himself, with his own two hands, because he deserved it but nobody else deserved to do it.

He never really had the stomach to do anything to a mark worse than, well, a shot to the head. A quick death. A merciful one, really. Sometimes he could pretend he was an angel of death, a bringer of justice. He never wanted to pull _them_ apart. He’d thought about it ( _had thought about it extensively_ ) but it didn’t have the same appeal.

Until he met Kurusu.

And then the desperate hands wrenching at his sternum until it snapped were not his own. Or maybe the lungs rising-falling-rising-falling under his fingertips belonged to someone else. Or the hands, viscera-stained, sliding bloody and frantic on his cock, were the same steady hands that so patiently poured out cream-white designs in his espressos.

Sometimes he hated it. Went even harder on himself just to get out all his frustration. (Maybe passed out once or twice.) Despised Kurusu for taking yet another thing from him, something that was supposed to be _his_ and _all his_ , the _one_ thing that could be. 

Sometimes, though, more often, he lay there in his torn body and came, again and again, overwhelmed with-- with _gratitude_ for something that wasn’t even really happening. Didn’t have a chance in _hell_ of happening.

And yet.

He thinks of Joker’s eyes, piercing red and so _pleasantly_ wicked, and settles down on his knees, legs spread. Raises his blade and makes the first cut, from clavicle to clavicle, feels the blood flow down his chest and trickle down between his legs and he sighs out a hum. Imagines a red-gloved finger hooking into him and

ripping him apart

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from "ribcage" by mary lambert ft. angel haze & k.flay


End file.
